American
Hustle is a big, bold, and
brash study of big, bold, and brash characters. That's the key to the film's success: the
characters. They are con artists and feds, free spirits and housewives, gangsters and
politicians, and not a single one of them comes from some pre-defined mold. This is an energetic film in its Scorsese-inspired stylistic
flourishes—disorienting jump cuts, nearly nonstop contemporary music cues,
free-flowing camerawork, etc.—and winding plot of corruption, but the real
momentum here is in the fact that we have no idea how these damaged, desperate
characters will react at any given moment.

They
are all improvising to various degrees, and in a way, so, too, is the screenplay.
The film opens with a
most amusingly devious title card: "Some of this actually happened."Eric Singer and director David O. Russell's script is indeed based upon
an FBI sting called "Abscam," a years-long operation that's reduced to
the year 1978 here, and the general details in the film are apparently accurate.
American Hustle, though, isn't
about the factual details. It's not
a recounting of history but a look at how so many seemingly disparate people can
come together in adversarial collaboration to make history.

Actually,
even that seems too broad and sweeping a conclusion. Singer and Russell aren't making any kind of definitive statement about
systemic corruption or history with the film; both are merely elements of
something far more intimate. This is
a film that is constantly in the moment.

Even
when its characters are ruminating on the past, it is not so that the movie can allow us
to play catch up with them. There's
something in those flashbacks, accompanied by narration, that sets forth to define
these people in their current lives. It's
not just trivia, for example, that Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) used to
throw bricks through storefront windows in his neighborhood when he was a child.
It was a matter of survival for his timid father's window business, which
in turn was a means of survival for the young Irving.

It's
this quality, as well as the ruthless methods to which he was drawn to achieve
that essential goal, that made him the man he is. Irving still runs the window store and a dry cleaning business, but those
are just fronts for his real career. He's
a confidence man who deals in forged and stolen art and makes promises of loans
to people even more desperate than he is. He
has no way to actually give out loans, but he still keeps the fee for his
"services."

Everything
about Irving is phony, from wardrobe—collected from customers who have left
things behind at the cleaners—to his hair. The hair alone, a comb-over so intricate that we're nearly hypnotized by
the way he assembles it in the film's opening scene, says a lot about him. It's not just the deception but the confidence it takes to deceive with
such bluntness.

That
confidence is what attracts Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) to him. She's also a survivalist, having dropped her work as a stripper to take a
more socially acceptable job. At a
certain point, she started faking it, too, taking on the name Edith Greensly,
tossing the title "Lady" before it, and adopting an English dialect. They are perfect for each other, and together, they start bringing in
more money than either could ever have imagined.

Then
the feds get involved. A driven FBI
agent named Richie DiMasso (Bradley Cooper) pretends to be one of their marks,
arrests Sydney, and coerces Irving to participate in an operation that basically
amounts to entrapment. If Irving
fools enough people to engage in illegal activity, Richie will get the two con
artists out of their legal trouble.

This is
just scratching the surface of the long grift—involving United States
Congressmen, a New Jersey mayor, the Miami mafia, and a fake sheikh from the
Middle East—that follows. The
screenplay lets us in on Irving's method and then shows us how Richie's ambition
threatens to ruin his own goal. It
allows its characters to be completely upfront with their plans and motives only
to set in motion a string of interpersonal conflicts that make us question if
anyone's loyalties are what we previously believed.

As
ideal—in its own warped way—as Sydney and Irving's relationship seems, the
wrench is Irving's wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), a woman who holds their
marriage and son—whom Irving adopted—over his head as a form of coercion. Then there's the fact that Richie, himself engaged, is attracted to
Sydney, whom he believes is actually English nobility, and vice versa—or so it
seems.

There's
a lot of humor to be had from the fact that these three—as much as they
distrust and, to varying degrees, hate each other—deserve each other. No one here is innocent or anything approaching honorable, but the
performances ensure that our sympathies—misplaced though they may be—are
always with these characters. We
understand their desperation.

Bale is
pathetic in his physical appearance—husky and hunched with that truly
ridiculous hairstyle—and as the only foundation of his life (Sydney and his
sense of family) starts to crumble, but there's also an active mind at work in
trying to counter the forces against him. Adams
is at once vulnerable and assertive in a remarkable performance that must make
clear distinctions between her character's moments of playacting and
authenticity. As the man who should
be the moral authority here, Cooper plays his determined FBI agent as a
petulant, impatient child who seeks to punish those who dare to make him wait
or—perish the thought—question him (Look no further than the climax of the
relationship with his boss, played by Louis C.K., which is either payback for
giving him reasonable pushback or not getting to the point of a personal
anecdote quickly enough).

Lawrence
is hilarious as a woman who can do no wrong (She believes the world should thank
her for discovering that assorted newfangled appliances can start fires when she
doesn't follow the directions properly) but who eventually reveals a frightened
side when confronted with change, and an austerely sincere Jeremy Renner plays
the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, who believes he will be able to renovate
Atlantic City and, more importantly, help his struggling constituency with a
deal he doesn't know is fraudulent. It's
a stellar ensemble that Russell has put together.

He's
also assembled a great piece of entertainment that blends curious fact with
enlightening fiction. In its study
of multiple forms of deception, American
Hustle is freewheeling in form, and it's a perfect complement to these
fascinating characters, who are trying to persevere by the skin of their teeth.